New Mexico Skies

 Spectacular monsoon clouds envelop Albuquerque today.  It makes me think I should get up to Chaco Canyon to give them the proper foreground.

Giving the Military Establishment Some Credit

A recent article in The New Yorker provides chilling details about Trump's ignorant brutality, the  threat he posed to national integrity, and how the country's military leaders saw the threat building on the eve of January 6th.  Trump ignored the advise of his top military advisors at nearly every opportunity, and he kept replacing them in an effort to get unquestioning support for a wide range of strategic and political issues including the constitutionally prohibited use of the military within the borders of the U.S. 

Trump's relationship with the military may have been the most egregiously fraught in our history, but it was not the first time that a President of the United States ignored the strategic expertise and ethical concerns of the top brass.

In 1945 Harry Truman went ahead with dropping two atomic bombs on Japan in spite of the contrary opinions of many of the historically recognized military leaders of those times.  Here is a sampling of those opinions as reported in Wikipedia:

...Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote in his memoir The White House Years:

In 1945 Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.^[109]

Other U.S. military officers who disagreed with the necessity of the bombings include General of the Army Douglas MacArthur,^[110][111] Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy (the Chief of Staff to the President), Brigadier General Carter Clarke (the military intelligence officer who prepared intercepted Japanese cables for U.S. officials), Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz (Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet), Fleet Admiral William Halsey Jr.(Commander of the US Third Fleet), and even the man in charge of all strategic air operations against the Japanese home islands, then-Major General Curtis LeMay:

The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military point of view, in the defeat of Japan.

— Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, ^[102]

The use of [the atomic bombs] at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons ... The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.

— Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, Chief of Staff to President Truman, 1950, ^[112]

The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.

— Major General Curtis LeMay, XXI Bomber Command, September 1945, ^[113]

The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment ... It was a mistake to ever drop it ... [the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it. 

— Fleet Admiral William Halsey Jr., 1946,...

Water

 The summer monsoon has put water back in the Rio Grande all the way from Albuquerque to Mesilla. 

Also see:

Monsoon flows temporarily prop up New Mexico waters

from NM Political Report

A way out for Joe

 Biden's second round of Covid suggests the possibility for an early, graceful exit from the Presidency.  Once the mid-terms are over he could just announce that his health adds too much uncertainty to his continuation in office.  That opens the way to an orderly Constitutional transition to the Vice-President's ascension to power. Kamala Harris would then have the chance to show what her real capabilities are to govern.  Even if she does pretty well over the following two years there would likely be some stiff competition in the primaries for 2024, but there seems no more danger in that for Democrats than if Joe were going for a second term.

New Mexico True

New Mexico is a violent state. It ranks among the worst for women murdered by men, child abuse and neglect are almost twice as common as they are nationwide, and its rate of suicide is one of the highest of any state. Last year, Albuquerque’s homicide rate shattered previous records, a 46% jump from 2020, and the state’s reached heights not experienced since 1986.  (A Missing Ingredient, The NM Political Report)

 New Mexico ranks at the top of quite a few lists of social disfunction, including violence and suicide.  That dubious honor will figure prominently in the State's upcoming elections, including that for the governor. The main remedy which will be proposed and debated by all candidates will be a higher rate of incarceration of offenders.  

If the politicians' knee-jerk rhetoric about crime and violence had any validity, one would expect that the U.S., with both the most people in jail and the highest rate of imprisonment of any country, ought to be one of the safer places to reside on the planet.  Similarly, it might seem logical to conclude that New Mexico's great increase in incarcerations over the past forty years should have substantially reduced crime and violence.

The actual trajectory of crime and violence in New Mexico and the U.S. belies the reigning political philosophy.  

The above cited article  in the NM Political Report looks at two potent contributors to the State's out of control crime and violence: the association of alcohol consumption with violence, and the intertwined issue of childhood trauma.  The assembled facts and analysis are worth considering.

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Update:

Ted Alcorn has written an excellent followup to the above, Every door is the right door, with a very optimistic report on the prospects for improved access to effective alcohol abuse counseling.

Networking

 

The rapid pace of technology development means that the associated gadgets, be they cameras or computers, lose value very quickly.  By the time my family settled in southern New Mexico in the late 1980s I was able to pick up an Osborne portable computer identical to the one I had used in Idaho for a fraction of its original price.  The Osborne had limited capacities and capabilities compared to the newer machines by then, but the bundled software still made it quite useful.  Also, accessories such as printers and modems had become much more affordable.  

The function of the modem was to transform the digital signals produced by a computer into analog pulses that could be transmitted over phone lines, and to then take the incoming analog stream and turn it back into something useable to the receiving computer.  That process opened the possibility of enabling and managing communications through the computer.

By the time I got my first 300 baud modem connected to my second-hand Osborne computer several computer hobbyists around Las Cruces were running electronic bulletin board systems (bbs) to which I could connect and exchange text messages.  The actual product was still just blocky characters on a green screen, but for me it was an immensely thrilling experience, a manifestation of what had been up to then no more than a sci-fi fueled fantasy.

While it was possible to communicate through the phone system with bulletin board systems anywhere the wires went, long distance charges made that possibility impractical for the average enthusiast like me.  What changed everything was the rapid development of networks connecting computer bulletin boards world wide. What made those wide-area connections affordable were software innovations including data compression and automatic scheduling which transmitted stored messages and files in very short bursts late at night when long-distance phone rates were low.

Fidonet was the most successful of the amateur wide-area networks. The software was open-source, distributed at no cost and could be run on just about any computer available at the time including my old Osborne.  It did not take me long to set up my own Fidonet node at home, and I also started talking about the potential that such technology might have for contributing to the empowerment of people working in social services organizations of all kinds.

The Fidonet Logo

One person for whom I demonstrated the Fidonet system was a professor of social work at New Mexico State University who was also the head of the local branch of the National Association of Social Workers (NASW).  He immediately appreciated the potential of the system to make connections with colleagues statewide and nationally and suggested that together we could develop a grant proposal supporting the building of a social services oriented computer network for the state NASW chapter.  

Our proposal won quick approval from the NASW and we were able to purchase an IBM clone computer to host a Fidonet node which I set up in the professor's office.  I spent a lot of time there at the university assisting with presentations and tutorials, but the actual operation of the network for which I was responsible could be accomplished in my spare time from home using my old Osborne.  I did eventually get myself a computer similar to the one running the NASW system and finally retired the old Osborne.

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Update:

An article on The Nation takes up the thread of this post with a closer look at computer networking via modems and telephone lines prior to the development of the Internet and the World Wide Web.  Historian Jacob Bruggeman interviews Kevin Driscoll about his book, The Modem World.

The Rio Grande

 This is the first time in the fourteen years we have lived here that I have seen the river run dry at Albuquerque.